Wired to betray - between loyalty and you

CHAPTER 3

DERRICK'S POV

I like that I affect her. The fact that it skews negative is almost beside the point — what matters is that it happens at all, which is rarer than people assume. It's nearly unheard of for Zang Thomas's son to walk into a room without people either bowing or performing for him. Most decide what they think of me before I've said a word. They've usually decided before I've even arrived.

She hadn't.

What lived in her eyes wasn't fear — it was something colder. Caution. A completely different reaction. Fear flinches; caution calculates, waits, decides whether you're worth the trouble. And she certainly hadn't given me the eager, soft deference most people manage within thirty seconds of learning my surname. If there was fear buried somewhere beneath that composure, it wasn't fear of me specifically — not fear of the name, of what it usually carries. And that, for reasons I hadn't bothered to examine yet, bothered me more than it should have.

The address had been an impulse — born somewhere between brushing my teeth and deciding breakfast wasn't worth the effort. I hadn't planned to reply to her message at all. I'd read it once, set the phone down, told myself I'd think about it later — a lie convincing enough that I'd nearly stopped noticing I was telling it.

But her face kept resurfacing. The flicker of recognition the second my name landed. That flash of nerve, quickly hidden. The sudden, almost involuntary need for forgiveness she'd tried and failed to mask. Each reaction I'd pulled out of her — and I had pulled them, deliberately, the way you tug a thread to see how far it unravels — had stayed with me longer than it had any right to.

I told myself it meant nothing.

I'm fairly convincing, even to myself, when I want to be.

I was cutting across the car park toward my own car the next morning — I'd left both phone and card upstairs, which almost never happens, and the irritation of it had me moving faster than usual — when I heard an engine coming in too fast. Tires gripped the pavement with the particular urgency of someone whose attention had completely left the road.

I turned.

Her car's nose dipped toward me in that long, suspended half-second every near-collision seems to produce — as though the car itself had paused to consider the consequences, holding its breath right alongside her.

I didn't move.

I'd like to call that composure, but honestly it was closer to curiosity. I wanted to see what she'd do.

The brakes caught. The car shuddered to a stop close enough that I could've laid a hand flat on the hood without much effort. I didn't bother. I just stood there, hands in my pockets, watching a woman I'd known for less than twenty-four hours nearly commit vehicular manslaughter in a half-empty car park at six in the morning — and finding myself, against my better judgment, entertained.

She'd composed herself before her feet even hit the tarmac. That, more than the near-miss itself, was what caught my attention — not the danger, but how fast she dismissed it. Most people, after almost hitting a pedestrian, come apart a little. Hands shake. Voices climb an octave. Apologies spill out before the door's even open.

Zara offered none of that.

She got out muttering under her breath, sharp and irritated, the words too quiet to make out but the tone unmistakable. She wasn't shaken — she was annoyed, at the morning, the car, possibly me, in some order I hadn't worked out yet. And that told me clearly enough that seeing me again wasn't something she'd been looking forward to.

Good. Neither had I, in theory. In practice, I found I didn't mind it at all.

"Howdy, stranger," I said, letting the arrogance settle thick into my voice, curious where it would land.

She stopped a few feet away, arms crossed, wearing the same expression from yesterday — less an emotion than a calculation, the silent arithmetic of exactly how much restraint this conversation deserved.

"You sent me an address. With no context. At six in the morning," she said, each phrase clipped like a grievance she'd rehearsed beforehand, probably in the shower.

"You owe me an apology," I said. "I'll decide where and how it's delivered."

Her jaw tightened, barely. I noticed the movement and felt unreasonably pleased with myself for catching it.

"For all I know, this could be a setup," she shot back.

"For?" I asked, genuinely amused, tilting my head.

"To murder me," she returned, flat, as if she'd already accepted the possibility and simply wanted it on record.

"Hold on, Miss Zara." Something in my chest sharpened — not quite anger, something closer to its more controlled cousin. "I doubt you're important enough that I'd bother killing you."

It landed exactly the way I wanted it to.

Something flickered across her face — not quite a smile, not quite irritation, suspended in that narrow, irritating space between the two that I was beginning to suspect was simply her default setting around me.

"You don't know me, Zang," she said. "Keep your petty assumptions to yourself."

"Don't flatter yourself. I'd have to actually notice you first. And you hit me "

"Almost. I was hoping I had," she said — and smiled. The first real one I'd seen from her. It threw me more than I expected.

"Most people would apologize" I told her, recovering.

"I'm not most people. Most people fawn for your attention. I find it tiresome."

"With that much effort and that much attitude," I said, "I'm almost surprised you bothered apologizing at all."

She recoiled visibly, like I'd thrown something hot at her, and for half a second her expression cracked into something I couldn't quite name. Hurt, maybe — or close enough that it startled me more than her anger had. It was, I think, the most genuine emotion I'd pulled out of her since the corridor.

"You sent me an address," she said, her tone going flat and bored again, the mask sliding back into place faster than I could examine what had briefly been underneath it.

"And you'll come," I told her. Not a question.

She looked at me like she wanted to hit me and hadn't yet decided if I was worth the consequences. Not respect, exactly. Something else — something I didn't have a name for yet, sitting just behind her eyes where I couldn't reach it.

I let the silence stretch between us. Watched her not fill it.

That's the tell, I've learned — the way people rush to explain themselves the moment they feel they've said too little. Most can't survive more than four or five seconds of silence without flinching into speech. Zara just stood there, watching me back, like she had all the patience in the world and every bit of it was reserved for me specifically.

I tilted my head, studying her the way I'd been doing — almost without meaning to — since yesterday. Cataloguing the things that didn't add up. The notebook she'd clutched like it mattered. The recalibration behind her eyes when my surname landed. The fact that she was standing here at all instead of pretending the corridor had never happened.

None of it added up cleanly. I filed it away anyway.

I slid my hands into my pockets and left without another word, on the theory that the last word is always more interesting left unsaid. Retrieved my phone and card from upstairs. Walked back into the building like the morning hadn't happened at all.

A flaw I've always had — I love a challenge. It's the kind that's cost me more than I'd care to admit, the kind that pulls me in every time, no matter how many times it's burned me before.

Zara is, without question, a challenge.

And I intend to c***k her open.

I took out my phone, opened a new message, and typed two lines before I could talk myself out of it.

8:30 pm. Don't be late.